One of our most inventive novelists brings it all back home

Colson Whitehead, the MacArthur Award–winning author of such highfalutin metafictions as The Intuitionist and John Henry Days, has now written a supremely intuitive first-person coming-of-age novel, Sag Harbor (Doubleday). Whitehead vibrantly imagines his "Autobiographical Fourth Novel" from the formative summers he spent at his family's beach house in the historically African-American Long Island enclave of Azurest.

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Sag Harbor's narrator is 15-year-old Benji Cooper, a bright black kid who attends a virtually all-white prep school in Manhattan. While Benji's agenda is more private and personal than polemical and political, he peppers his narrative with cogent asides on race, class, sex, religion, and culture. And once Benji arrives on the island for the summer, he weaves a spell that is by turns enchanting, mood-shifting, and side-splitting, sharing the sweet, sad secrets of his mixed-up, mid-'80s adolescence.

With his doctor father and lawyer mother driving out from the city only on some weekends, Benji and his younger brother, Reggie, have the ranch-style house to themselves—along with their near-magically described treks through the woods and along paths down to the beach, and bike rides into town or to neighboring black communities with shared family roots.

When not working at a local ice cream shop, Benji hangs with his tight posse of summer pals who listen to music, watch movies and TV, hit the beach, shoot BB guns, then move on to kissing girls and sneaking beers. Family dramas flare up, revealing a bully father beneath the professional polish, a mother whose social poise hides her deference, and an absent sister whose Azurest days seem long gone.

Of course, summer must end. But something timeless ties Benji to his history, to his memories, and will always mark his summer days: "I will take the world at its word and allow that there are those who have experienced great love in their lives. This must be so.... There are those who have never loved, and they walk through their days grasping after true connection. And then there is me. Ladies and gentlemen and all of you at home just tuning in, the angel of my heart, my long lost love, was a house."